Show Notes

Check out my Digital Self at tkspeaks.com (click on the chat bubble in the lower right of the page)

About

Transcript

Welcome back to Foresight Radio, where we dive deep into the technologies shaping our world and explore how they’re redefining the way we work, live, and lead. I’m Tom Koulopoulos, and today we’re going to talk about a fascinating application of AI, creating a digital self. If you’ve followed any of my writing or speaking you may be familiar with the idea of creating a Digital Self. Its’ something my coauthor Nathaniel palmer and I covered in detail in our book Gigatrends, The idea here is simple in practice but profound in its applications. A digital self is a versions of you that in its most basic form has access to your knowledge base such as writings, diaries, videos, and audio recordings. Once trained on this material it can have a conversation that mimics the way you would respond if you were speaking with someone. For example, Imagine your great grandkids and generations beyond chatting with you long after you’re gone. Science fiction, right? Stick with me, I’ll show you how I did just that using OpenAI’s APIs.  But it can go well beyond that to identify patterns of behavior, access and mange sensitive information such as finances, medical records, legal documents, and anything else that defines you. Why would you want a digital self? Well, take listen to my podcast on the value of digital advocacy for an example of how your digital self will one day dramatically alter the quality of your healthcare. The key here, of course, is having a trusted host for all of this sensitive information. However, it’s not as though all of this data isn’t already being stored in various ways, it’s just not all connected. Your healthcare data is scattered among providers, insurers, pharmacies, and the various medical services and devices, such as wearable, that you are connected to. The same applies to pretty much everything that a digital self would have access to. Although we may be 5-10 years from the realization of that sort of comprehensive digital self there are already ways to start building a basic version today. For fun (and maybe for posterity!), I decided to take on the task of building a digital version of myself. I uploaded my books, hundreds of Inc.com articles, podcasts from foresightradio.com, keynotes, and various white papers into a customized version of ChatGPT 4.0 using OpenAI’s APIs. That created a type of AI called a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), which is trained on my content, while also having the benefit of an LLM’s greater knowledge-base. To be clear, this isn’t exactly turnkey. you do need to pay to use OpenAI as the LLM, access its APIs and an API key, a plugin to create the dialog or chatbot that will access your knowledge base and OPenAI, a bit of basic coding skill, a vector database, such as pinecone, and a fair amount data on which to train your digital self. In addition I wanted to be able to avoid responses that would step outside of my writing and research—potentially creating hallucinations or answers that I would not have come up with—so, I specifically limited the AI to responses based on my information. I also made sure that all of the information in my knowledge base was stored locally in a vector database, rather than uploading everything to a public AI. You can see the results and try it out for yourself at tk speaks.com—just look for the chat bubble in the lower right corner. It’s impressive how closely it replicates my voice and blends ideas from thousands of pages I’ve written and hundreds of hours of speaking and podcasts.  What’s especially cool is that you can ask my digital self pretty much anything, and not just about tech. For example, ask about my thoughts on trust, love, raising kids, or even my feelings about gratitude.  Is this truly my immortal self? Will my kids and grandkids one day consult it for advice and bad puns? Not quite yet—but it’s certainly a glimpse of the future. Life may be short, but digital immortality is just getting started. Let’s see where it takes us. Thanks for listening! If you’re enjoying Foresight Radio, be sure to subscribe and share it with friends and colleagues. The best way to navigate the future is to keep asking questions, embracing change, and seeking out new perspectives. Until next time, I’m Tom Koulopoulos—stay curious.